The Game is Afoot! The Puzzle Rooms of Game On

The Riddle of the Sphinx. Rubik’s Cube. Wordle. The Kobayashi Maru. If you’re a maker, you probably enjoy puzzles — discovering how something works scratches an itch and brings a sense of order to the world.

That thrill is at the core of Game On, a live-action puzzle experience in Berkeley, California, cofounded by childhood friends James Hopkin, Tim Alley, and Eric Mittler. Unlike an escape room, where players linearly move through a puzzle-solving narrative like, say, a zombie apocalypse, Game On features puzzle rooms that operate independently. One room not to your liking? Try another that has a different type of puzzle to solve.

The Ball Game room, named after the kinetic artwork at its center, features steel pinballs descending an ornate maze of welded tracks, platforms, and switch points. It’s mesmerizing just to watch. But Hopkin added electronics throughout the sculpture — servos, magnets, and other mechanical surprises — that enable players to manipulate the balls’ paths to victory.

“One of our goals was to create experiences that use different skill sets,” said Hopkin. “Ideally, we want every member of a team to shine.” So if recognizing the Ball Game’s patterns of frenetic objects is not your cup of tea, you may excel in the Darkness room, identifying mystery objects in the dark, just by feel — or smell! Or you can flex your muscles in the Ropes room, where players must navigate thick ropes suspended from the ceiling.

Secret Lair

Game On’s customers include adventurous adults, families, and college students. “The trick was — and still is — how to create an experience that’s appropriate and thoroughly satisfying for such a diverse audience,” said Alley.

To that end, each game has myriad adjustments that help players find the fulfilling tension between “too easy” and “impossible.” Hidden away in the Master Control room, a bank of monitors display real-time data coming from room sensors. The Node.js server software tracks a team’s progress by identifying their unique RFID card used to enter a room, and recording events that happen inside. Meanwhile, each room has a Raspberry Pi running Node-RED that controls the key functions, including game logic, lights, and audio hints.

Nudge nudge

“In one room, players need to crawl through a hole, but we found that many people just don’t see the hole,” said Mittler. “So we have a sensor that knows whether you crawled through the hole, and if that sensor hasn’t been triggered in a given time, we fire off an audio hint suggesting they try it.”

These nudges help players come to a solution without giving away the answer. And once a team solves a puzzle, it unlocks a different puzzle in the same room that may require a new approach.

“We want obstacles — and even some frustration — that force teams to communicate, collaborate, and just try different things,” said Hopkin. “That drama in working together sort of feels like a bottle of Coke, where you keep shaking it and the pressure that’s finally released when you solve a puzzle is enormous — those screams of joy can be heard throughout the building!”

Origin story

James Hopkin has participated in game events for years, the type where players must solve clues to progress to the next location — and more clues — until a team “finishes” the game. He got involved with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual event in January on the MIT campus where teams can be composed of a couple of hundred members and function without sleep breaks. (First prize? Designing next year’s puzzle. “The sweet spot is second place,” said Hopkin with a grin.)

Concept sketches for the Whack-A-Mole room

“The difficulty there is astounding,” says Hopkin. “For instance, you can face a puzzle based on quantum mechanics — it’s MIT, after all. And the puzzles are often just presented to you as a thing without instructions, with the answer being a word or short phrase. You can get a 10MB file of seeming nonsense, and you have to solve it. Or a bunch of pictures. There are a lot of puzzles where you just sit there, staring at it, and scratch your head.”

Hopkin grew up playing a lot of board games and chess. He took up duplicate bridge in college, a bridge variation where multiple competitors start with the same hand, and success is based more on skill than luck of the draw. While solving puzzles in their myriad forms, he started to see their patterns, like the game within the game. “I became interested in game design and what makes a good game,” said Hopkin. “Designing good puzzles scratches the same itch as trying to solve them.”

Making games

Hopkin had to develop new maker skills to create his puzzles. He learned Fusion 360 to model parts for 3D printing, and faced a steep learning curve with Unity to animate the digital faces in the Communication room, where an AI narrator drops players into a fairy tale-like choose-your-own-adventure story.

“If someone has done it, I feel like I can figure out how to do it, too,” said Hopkin. “We live in a golden age of YouTube, Make: magazine, and Instructables, where people have made a recipe for you to follow, and you can adapt that recipe to your needs.”

Game On currently has six rooms, with four new ones in development: Seahorses, an aquatic racetrack; Pinball, a massive pinball-billiards mashup; Escape, which emulates a prison cell; and Spy, a laser-security room. “More rooms will enable us to offer whole new types of experiences,” said Tim Alley. “Our original concept includes grouping games into meta-challenges. So far, Game On is only a ‘sampler platter’ of the eventual ‘multi-course meal’ we intend to offer.”

New rooms can take a couple of years to develop and build, because most of the puzzles are hand-built in Game On’s onsite workshop. During a Make: visit, Hopkin used a table saw to cut some parts for the Seahorses track, to be painted by resident artist Ren Spears, who created much of the art in the puzzle rooms.

Programmed for fun

One of the many games in the Ropes room requires players to pull on the correct ropes at exactly the right time. Initially the game was strict on the exact time when the rope had to be released; teams failed over and over because players held onto the correct rope for too long.

“The fun of the game is the difficulty of getting to the right rope, while the releasing of the rope is not hard nor the point,” said Eric Mittler. “The releasing of the rope was just making the game rule rigid, and in my eyes made for an ‘annoying loss’ that had to be explained to the customers. Any time I have to explain to a customer why they lost is an indicator of bad game design or a rigid game-rule constraint.”

So they adjusted the game to have an audio signal for a successful rope pull, and removed the frustrating failure condition for releasing a rope. The resulting game data showed a dramatic reduction in team failures before winning, but even more important was that customers better understood why they had been failing so they could refine their plans for success.

An enigma wrapped in a mystery

An unexpected aspect of visiting Game On is understanding the human puzzle of your enigmatologist teammates. Each room automatically resets itself, eliminating the need for a staff member to return props to their original place, and players simply leave the room while the game system resets itself in less than a minute. This provides valuable time to devise new strategies before the green light signals the room is ready for another shot.

During Make: magazine’s staff visit, we were able to witness each other’s approach to puzzle solving. Some immediately jumped into action, pushing buttons or manipulating whatever controls were available to see what they did. Others carefully inspected what was in front of them, assessing potential goals and courses of action. Some shouted out instructions, pointed out potential clues, suggested strategies, or asked questions (sometimes all at once!). Half the group seemed intent on solving the puzzles independently, while the other half offered ideas meant to be collectively added up by the team.

Observing how people approach problems — and the way we each work with others to solve them — is a Game On social experiment that can be adjusted and remixed just like the games themselves: Do you act differently with coworkers, family, or friends? Is it good to have like-minded collaborators? Or better to have teammates who offer completely different perspectives? Visiting Game On can help you deduce the answer to your own personal mystery: What kind of puzzle solver are you?

Shall we play a game?

Outside the San Francisco Bay Area? James Hopkin suggests these puzzle experiences to scratch that itch:

• Boda Borg in Malden, Massachusetts; also Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Ireland
• Level 99 in Natick, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island
• District 57 in Charlotte, North Carolina
• Activate Games in 22 U.S. states, Canada, United Kingdom, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland
• Amuse: The Adventure Museum in Memphis, Tennessee
• BRKTHROUGH in Houston, Texas and Overland Park, Kansas

Featured photo by Ren Spears

This article appeared in Make: Vol 94.